Paul Christopher: Valley of the Templars

The next morning he and Eddie went to the hotel concierge, asked a number of questions and got satisfactory answers. Their first chore was a taxi ride to a store called Save More Surplus on the western edge of a public housing project ten or eleven blocks from the flying saucer shape of Toronto City Hall. Eddie bought a battered knapsack with a faded Canadian flag sewed onto the flap, and Holliday bought two black Samsonite F’lite hard-shell suitcases. They then had the taxi do a U-turn and take them west along Queen Street until they reached a store called Henry’s Photo. While the taxi waited Holliday went into the big store, bought a Nikon D2X camera body and every lens and accessory that was available as well as a large block of cutout hard foam to protect it all.

They dropped their purchases off at the hotel, then took a second taxi to the local Walmart, where they bought a commercial-grade Weston Vacuum Sealer with an eighteen-inch seal, a box of one hundred large bags, two bottles of Krazy Glue and a black yoga mat.

They took the sealer and their other purchases back to the hotel, where Holliday dropped off Eddie and continued on to Royal Bank Plaza at the foot of Yonge Street, Toronto’s version of Broadway. The main branch of the bank was housed in a somewhat ostentatious skyscraper with gold-tinted faceted windows. Banks, never really liking the idea of people withdrawing money, balked slightly at Holliday requesting a hundred thousand dollars in American twenties, but eventually and after a few phone calls to the Bahamas they complied, giving him the money in a white cardboard box with a discreet lion rampant logo in one corner. Holliday immediately took the money back to the hotel, and the real labors began.

“You really think this is going to work, mi colonel ?” Eddie asked, staring at their purchases spread out across the dining table in their suite.

“If what you tell me about customs at Jose Marti Airport is right, it should work like a charm,” Holliday said, smiling at his friend.

One hundred thousand dollars in American twenty-dollar bills weighs almost exactly eleven pounds. Each bill is approximately six inches by two inches, which means that a total of twenty-seven stacks of forty-seven twenties, or one hundred thousand dollars in total, can be vacuum-sealed in a single eighteen-by-eighteen-inch bag a little less than a quarter of an inch high. With the black lining of the Samsonite carefully removed, the bag could be glued to the back of the suitcase, covered with a carefully cut piece of black foam from the yoga mat and then the black nylon lining replaced. Which is exactly what they did.

At the conceirge’s suggestion they had an excellent dinner of osso buco at a restaurant simply called Grace and returned to the hotel. Back in their suite, Holliday trimmed the camera foam to the exact dimensions of the doctored suitcase, then cutouts for the camera body, the lenses and accessories. With that complete, Holliday went down to the business center and within half an hour he had cut and pasted off the Internet to make himself fifty “engraved” business cards, using the name on his passport and driver’s license:

UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE CENTER

JOHN LEESON

SENIOR STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

He made another set identifying Eddie as his assistant and printed those out, as well. Considering the fact that Havana was a Unesco World Heritage city, it made sense that they would send a photographer assistant around every few years to document and project on the restoration of historic buildings in the city, and all the camera equipment in the suitcase would easily disguise the added eleven pounds of weight.

“That’s about it,” Holliday said. “Tomorrow we buy some clothes and a few guidebooks in the morning, have our meeting down the street in the afternoon and the next day we fly to Cuba.”

“And pray that everything goes as we have planned when we get there,” added Eddie.

Dr. Steven Braintree’s office at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies was located on the third floor of a large, stodgy-looking neo-Georgian building kitty-corner to the hotel on the southern side of Bloor Street. The office was pretty much the way Holliday had remembered: piles of papers on piles of file folders on piles of books with a few overflowing filing cabinets and more files, papers and books piled on his wide windowsill. Braintree hadn’t changed much, either; there were a few flecks of gray in his long dark hair now, but the trendy Prada glasses, the sneakers and the jeans were just the same. This time the message on his black T-shirt said FREE GIGI’S! PIZZA GIGI’S, BEST PIZZA IN TORONTO-PICKY POTHEADS PICK PIZZA GIGI’S.

Holliday made the introductions and they sat down in what little space was left. “Been a while, Colonel. I was a little surprised to hear from you,” said Braintree. Holliday had been following clues to the origins of the Templar sword he’d found hidden in his uncle Henry’s house, and Braintree had been on the list. “You ever find what you were looking for?” asked the history professor.

“Too much, when you get right down to it,” Holliday replied. It had never occurred to him that there would be a litter of bodies left behind him on his search or that the monk Helder Rodrigues would pass along the best-kept secret in seven hundred years before dying in his arms.

“So, what can I do for you now?” Braintree asked.

“Tell me everything you know about the Templars in Cuba.”

Braintree glanced at Eddie. “ Te Cubana? ”

“ Si, Doctore. ” Eddie nodded.

“Miami?”

“ Alamar, ” responded the Cuban with a smile. Braintree laughed.

“ Un cubano real, entonces, ” said Braintree.

“ Si, ” said Eddie.

According to Braintree, after the dissolution of the Templar order by Pope Clement in 1312, its remnants fled in all directions, some across the English Channel into England and Scotland, some-as Holliday well knew-to the Azores and some to Portugal and Spain. The ones who crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into the Catalonian Province of Spain enjoyed a brief life as the Christ Knights of Catalonia, but they were quickly rooted out by the Catholic king of Spain. Those who traveled by sea and landed in Portugal fared much better and came under the protection of King Diniz under the name the Order of Christ in 1319, which led directly to Emmanuel I and Christopher Columbus.

“ That you’ll have to explain,” said Holliday.

Braintree did. Although virtually every school history text in North America identified Columbus as an Italian from Genoa, there was virtually no real evidence of this at all. It was far more likely that he was born in either Spain or, even likelier, Portugal.

By 1492, the year Columbus sailed west to what he thought was the Indies, both Columbus and Emmanuel I were members of the Ordem Militar de Cristo , or the Military Order of Christ, the present incarnation of the Knights Templar in Portugal at the time. Although Columbus soughts funds from Isabella of Spain for his voyage of discovery, he already had a secret pact with Emmanuel that any information about his voyage that he gave to Spain should also be given to Portugal. Columbus agreed and the Templar cross on the sails of his famous ships, the Nina , the Pinta and the Santa Maria , were a signal to Emmanuel that their secret bond would be kept.

Columbus spent very little time on the island of Cuba before moving on to Hispaniola, or what is now known as Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. One of the crew members on the first voyage, a man in his midtwenties and of prominent birth, Diego Velazquez, caught Columbus’s eye and soon after they settled in Hispaniola, Columbus ritually made Velazquez an officer in the Ordem Militar de Cristo , an honor the young Spaniard took very seriously. Nineteen years later in 1511, Velazquez, now known as Don Diego Velazquez de Cuellar, was ordered by Diego Columbus, Christopher Columbus’s firstborn child and now viceroy of the West Indies, to occupy and conquer the island of Cuba. For the next five years Don Diego Velazquez established a number of settlements, including, most notably, Santiago de Cuba and San Cristobal de Havana, a small town just west of present-day Havana. For these efforts Don Diego Velazquez was made governor of Cuba by Diego Columbus. To commemorate the discovery of Havana, Don Diego built La Templete, a small neoclassical temple, which would soon become the headquarters for Don Diego’s version of the Ordem Militar de Cristo , which he named the Brotherhood of the Knights of Christ, La Hermandad dos Cavaleiros de Cristo . Very soon after this, at least between its members it became known simply as La Hermandad or the Brotherhood.